 Welcome to the first session of WordPress Multi-Site 101 with Tom Woodward. I'm here with Tom Woodward and Jim Groom. I'm Amanda Schmidt and we are very excited to take you through this, the first session of this month-long workshop series on all about WordPress Multi-Site. Anything you'd want to know about it. And today is going to kind of be establishing our foundation. We are going to talk about mainly the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress Multi-Site, get into those meat and potatoes, and also talk about what setups look like and just kind of give you the broad picture to get us ready and raring to go for the rest of the month. So, thank you Tom for being with us and we're ready when you are. All right. It is a pleasure to be here with both of you. So the reason I think that I am involved in this particular project is that I have worked with WordPress Multi-Site for many years. I think Jim said decade earlier, that's probably true and sort of terrifying because this aging thing kind of slips up on you, right? But it started off really the major stuff with WordPress Multi-Site for me was at Virginia Commonwealth University with a site called Rampages where I got to work with Dr. Gardner Campbell and we set up kind of a massive vision for what a giant community WordPress site might be and the fact that none of the accounts would ever be deleted and like it would grow forever because the stuff they are making is beautiful and should be preserved. So super cool, but it came with lots of challenges. I think the site is now around 37,000 sites. I no longer work at VCU and other people are trying to figure out what to do with the site now, but yeah, roughly 37,000 sites and about 3,500 users, so a big site. And for a large portion of that time, it was kind of just me doing most of the support for this. So lots of the things I learned were around kind of how to make this scale to very little, very little human capital as well as kind of learning the hard way about lots of things that I should have done and lots of technical details that would have been much better kind of sussed out at the beginning. So I don't know everything about WordPress multi-size, certainly, but I have learned a lot and hopefully throughout these sessions, I'll be able to save you headaches and pain and suffering that I endured firsthand, sometimes for months at a time, so that's my bona fides. I'm happy to have anyone challenge them. We'll take it. All right, all right. What are they saying? Oh, brother, we're out now. He's bona fide. I think so. I think so. I put in my time. I put in my time and reclaims been helpful for us throughout that whole process. Like we were with WP Engine and we had to move over and we had to do a lot of crazy stuff. So, you know, other people have bled and sweated through this thing as well, including poor Matt Roberts, who's stuck there with it now. Love you, Matt. I'm sorry. That could be a whole different stream, couldn't it? Yes. Well, how about you want me to get started and I'll just kind of describe what WordPress multi-site is for those of us who don't know. Perfect. Awesome. All right. So WordPress multi-site lets you do is ordinarily you might have a domain on one's own instance or you might be familiar with individual WordPress sites. So those things kind of live in isolation, you know, you put a plug in there, a theme there, it's there for just that site. If you, as somebody trying to help a bunch of people with a bunch of different sites need to get in there, they're going to have to add you as a user or maybe you can log in via C panel if you got a domain on one's own kind of super admin path or something like that. But in any case, each of these things exist as islands in a sea and nothing they do impacts anyone around them as well as you can't really act on them at scale very easily. What WordPress multi-site does is it kind of brings you into one group where you have individual sites, but when you install plugins, when you activate themes and the majority of cases, they're all available across all the sites that kind of live on this multi-site. And you as a super admin can hop into all those places and do whatever you need to do. You can activate plugins so that people can't turn them off. You can have certain plugins on by default. You have a lot of different choices that help you work across a community in ways that are really nice. So benefits, you make the decisions about what themes and plugins are present as the super admin. The negative of that is you're making those decisions. You know, I talk a lot about polarity in these cases. You could say you get no plugins in one theme. You could say, as I think we did on rampages, you get like, I don't know, 100 themes and 300 plugins. There's a lot of distance between those two poles where you're trying to figure out how much complexity can you take? What's it like for the users? There's there's a lot to think through there. And you as a super admin are kind of responsible for doing that thinking and for dealing with the complexity that you allow and create. I think there's a happy middle ground where you can give a lot of choice and enable a lot of flexibility, but not so much that it begins to drown you. Another advantage to WordPress multi-site is it's one place to update themes and plugins. You don't have to rely on people kind of keeping things up to date. You can do it centrally and make sure you're running kind of safe and modern plugins. Downside of that is if there's a problem with any of those updates or any of those things, it spreads, right? It tends not to be contained to just one site. The other thing I mentioned previously is you can kind of hop between sites to help people out. And that is wonderfully awesome. And there are some plugins that also let you kind of switch and emulate different users, kind of like Canvas is masquerade or lots of other ways that people kind of pretend to be somebody else, which can be really handy. I don't know that there's a whole lot of negative to that other than like be careful about how much you help and to what degree and set some reasonable boundaries there for yourself. Another great thing about WordPress multi-site is you control the sign-in sign-up process and you can customize that. That can be really important when you're trying to figure out what sort of data you need to show success and kind of what kind of experience you want people to have as they join this community. Negatives there is you have to do it or you have to think about it or you just get what's default, which probably is not going to be quite what you need. So there's a little bit of thinking through your big project, thinking through experience from the user's end to make this good, interesting, informative while gathering just enough information, because if you may ask for too much, people stop. You ask for too little, you end up not being able to know what you need to know. The other nice thing about WordPress multi-site is it's easier to see community activity. It's really hard, as you may already know, to kind of get a sense of what's going on across a bunch of separate WordPress sites. You can subscribe via RSS, you can do some things like that, but they're kind of require you as a human to organically go out and add these RSS feeds and know that the site is there, do it and it's not a thing that you can share necessarily very easily. But WordPress multi-site, you can see across all these sites and see when their last update it, you can run database queries in interesting ways with different plugins. You can create activity streams from everything happening across the entire network. And that can be like a really awesome and beautiful thing when you're trying to create community and when you're trying to get people to see what other people are doing and become inspired by it. Negatives of that are aspects of privacy. And you know, that's a bigger and bigger deal now and trying to figure out how do we get students and faculty thinking about aspects of privacy in these sorts of environments in ways that aren't, again, at that idea of polls. Not everything needs to be 100% in the open for the world and not everything needs to be locked down as if it's your deepest, darkest secret that you never want anyone to know about. So what's the middle ground and how does that impact activity streams and education and sign up experience? It's an additional element of complexity but a good and worthwhile one in my opinion. And then I think finally like what you may see is what people want is WordPress. If that's what they want, they just want WordPress, then it makes sense to give it to them. If they don't want cPanel, they don't want to look at databases, they don't want any of the additional complexities that are also opportunities, I mean don't force it on them given this, you know, straightest path to what people want. I think that's most of the advantages. And I think really what you're looking at with a community always is that it's more complex. It's more complex technically. It's more complex in relationships of plugins and themes. You know, people are going to want to do strange things on there. You have to decide whether you're going to let them. How will it impact the neighbors, so to speak. And then you have to realize like any flaw in the system tends to be a global one. So if you get hacked or there are security concerns of that type, you know, that is going to impact far more people. So you have to be cautious because every action has greater chance of repercussions and the larger your community grows, the larger your vulnerability is and the more impactful any options, you know, any, I guess, intrusions on your site are. Tom, I really like that you bring up the idea of the complexity of WordPress multi-site. Whereas you have the single WordPress install in say a cPanel as you referenced. But then when you have WordPress multi-site as an admin, one of the things you're taking on is the complexity of the WordPress multi-site database, which is significantly different than the one-off WordPress database. And that's a big shift as becoming the admin. And it's both a power because like for all the reasons you said, you can manage more users, you can make more themes and plugins accessible, et cetera. But then you have to learn essentially a whole new topography of database to make sure you can manage that long term. Right. And it's, you know, it depends too on how much time you spend in the database. You know, a lot of people I know admin WordPress sites and maybe have never seen the WordPress database. So I mean, it's not a necessity. But you, if you are very familiar with the database as it is in a single install, the multi-site and certainly what Rampages is a sharded multi-site is going to take a little bit of reorientation. Yeah. And also we have mentioned it, or we haven't mentioned it, it's worth mentioning it changes the way in which you think through backups. Right. So one of the big differences, advantages disadvantages with a WordPress single install versus a WordPress multi-site is you can basically, you know, roll back a single install fairly simply. And because it's isolated, you get that back up in all the files, et cetera. With a WordPress multi-site of one site amongst many loses information or data or has a hack or it becomes a kind of all of that often has to be rolled back. And that's something we often discuss with admins about thinking through various backup procedures. Are there plugins that you could maybe offload to S3 like UpDirect Plus and stuff. So maybe have other options because sometimes with WordPress multi-site backups, it can be a little bit more nuclear than you're used to with one-offs. Right. I think about it a lot like an apartment building, you know, versus a single house on like a big field. Right. Like you can do whatever you want in your house and it doesn't really impact a whole lot. And you can probably return it to state pretty easily because like it's just a one thing in a big field. But like if you pull a, you know, if you blow up an apartment in the middle of this complex building, you can't just go in there very easily and like plug a new apartment in. It's because it's impacting your neighbors. You know, you have to think about all the stuff. Maybe blew the ceiling out of the guy upstairs, the nose, you know, but like that's, that's how I try and get people to think about like this interrelationship is that you're going from solo to community. And there are just complexities there. And when you think about WordPress multi-site, I mean like in a big one, like there's stuff going on continuously. It's not like you're single install when you're like, oh, my last post update was, you know, three weeks ago. So it doesn't matter if I don't have a recent backup, I can just overwrite all the stuff or I lose one post. Can't do that on the community site because who knows who you're impacting. And they're going to be really unhappy when they lose content if you were to do like a whole rollback. And it takes a lot more communication. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Managing an apartment. Not a job I want, but you know, that's more what that multi-site is. But cool stuff. You have cool neighbors. You get to see cool things. Maybe walking down the hallway. Somebody offers you cookies. There's some positives to being in the community. Does it work on the city like sewage system or do you have to have your own and get it all pumped out? Because that often matters with the acts. That may be maybe taking the metaphor beyond where I'm able to do it. Fair enough. But I think what'll be helpful is maybe just taking a little tour of multi-site and seeing what it looks like as a vanilla and how it kind of differs from single install. So I have a blank one. So just as an aside, and we'll provide a link or something to it, but like I use WP local to do my local development work. And it's a really nice way to play around with stuff. And in this case, I just spun up a WordPress multi-site so that people could could see it vanilla. And I'll also show you kind of my more messy live production site where I just throw a bunch of stuff. So here we are. It probably looks pretty familiar. I do want to draw your attention to a couple things. So because it's multi-site, by default, it's going to have this little my sites icon in the corner. And as you get a lot of sites, it might look more like this. Something you want to be cautious about as a multi-site admin is how many of those sites you end up getting affiliated with. I think initially I had, I don't know, several hundred. And it really started bogging down my whole admin experience. I just in frustration one time created another account. But there are some other ways you can deal with that that are a little less extreme. But it's one of those like, hey, heads up, don't become the admin on a whole bunch of sites and a member on a whole bunch of sites. You're an admin. You can just hop in. You don't need to be a member. But the majority of your work is going to be done here in Network Admin. So let's take a look. It's very exciting. I have one site and one user. I'll be able to see all the sites here. I can add new ones. Same deal with users. But let's look at our settings because this is where you're going to make your first choices. As you see, registration. You can, on those polls, you can set registration to be entirely disabled or you can set it so anyone can sign up for both sites and user accounts. These days, there are pretty good bots that will sign up for your stuff if you don't have any restrictions and they will populate your multi-site with all sorts of spam of the most unpleasant nature. So I discourage people from leaving it wide open. Generally, what we do in educational settings is limit the email registrations to whatever your institution is. Middlebury.edu or VCU.edu. And you can do a couple of them. Like at VCU, we had a medical campus and some other URLs that we added in there that were different. So we had a couple domains there. But pretty simple thing to do. And when we needed to add people outside of that, a lot of times I'd just throw an extra domain in there, even if it was Gmail, sign the people up real quick and then remove the email domain. Nothing too fancy there. I never bothered with banning email domains just because it's easier to whitelist than to blacklist the names. Let's look at some of these other options because I skipped a few. So I did leave this on, send the network admin and email notification every time someone registers a site or user account. I did that out of paranoia. I didn't look at every single one of them, but I did set up an email filter so that they went to a particular folder and I kind of scroll through there just as a way to keep a pulse on it. Maybe not the greatest way or the best idea, but sometimes I'd see a cool name like a cool site name or a cool username and I go see what they were doing. Other times I was just paranoid about people making something crazy that would get everyone in trouble. It didn't happen though. This is thousands and thousands of sites over many years and we never had someone name themselves some sort of weird curse word or have a site that was grossly inappropriate or anything like that. Can I ask you a question on that, Tom? In your experience, do you think that's because WordPress multi-site is often associated with a user and their email? Hence, it's not like being anonymous and feeling like they can do whatever they want. There is a one-to-one in terms of you being able to see who did or created the site. I think that was a part of it certainly because you are signing up with your real VCU email address. Now you can have your username and your display name be whatever you want at that kind of pseudonymous public view, but I think at its root and at its core, we did know who the real person was behind that. But also, a part of me likes to believe a little bit that people aren't as terrible as people make about to be and they're not just going to do quite as many stupid things as instinctively as people might think. So maybe that's a bit naive, but I was really impressed. We only had a handful of DMCA takedown requests in the entire time I worked at VCU with this. One of them was like a bad request and we were able to fight it and the provost supported us and we left the content up. That kind of stuff was super cool. I think the majority of DMCA things we had were really faculty putting like course stuff up in a way that was a little too public. So that's kind of an interesting aspect to it that I don't think you really hear about. But you can set up registration in a lot of different ways. I mean here you kind of have the default stuff that you can choose from. You can set up custom registration paths. You can set up registration and creation through something like gravity forms or a variety of other plugins and things that let you control what happens in registration in different ways, solicit additional information and that's a really important and useful thing to think through as you come up with this. Can I ask you on that add new users because I think that's the next one you're getting to. That was always a trick because add new users even if you let admins of new WordPress sites that are created in the WordPress multi-site add users are they still are they limited to the users already in the user database or to users with a VCU.edu for example domain or is this giving them more power to add anyone? I think in this case they can add from the existing users and some of this like it gets a bit hazy for me because we made so many modifications early on that enabled people to do stuff. I think though if you're going to add a completely new to everything user, you're going to need to be a super admin. So that's that's my recollection on that but I do think allowing site administrators to add the new users from the existing kind of repository of users is a good choice. Yes I agree and you know for for everything that's here by default and is a rule by default, there are ways programmatically or through plugins that already exist to subvert that rule. So that's something to know right like nothing is ever absolute in this stuff and you can kind of plot your own path if you care about individual pieces enough and and I encourage it. Here is something that that people I don't feel like really customize quite the way they might including myself. We did some of this but like these new site settings you have the ability to change the emails to change what is the first post and page you can set all this stuff up so that when a new site is created and there are some plugins that even go beyond this you're controlling all the stuff that's there and you can have some fun with this it's part of setting up the kind of culture of the site. I think Shannon asked in one of the forums like you know how do you kind of onboard people? This is a beautiful opportunity to customize kind of that experience and to add like I don't know links to a tutorial click here for a forum where we talk about this stuff see some cool examples of x and y like customize this stuff it's it's meant to be customized it should be customized it's how you're setting up kind of that first open the door experience what's that like for your people. It's interesting too right because you could link to support documentation you could have a getting started you know two minute video that your culture creates like just use that because every person who creates a new site will see whatever you have there I mean it's also just strategic right for getting people up and running and understanding okay how do I get rid of that post now here's how you delete me whatever it is it's like a training that WordPress vanilla never does very well it's just like hello world goodbye you know right and yeah take advantage like it's to me it's like you're having a default thing happen if you're not caring enough to control it and to shape it so that it helps you then you know it's a it's a really missed opportunity in my mind um and I feel that way with all of this just really be intentional keep thinking through how do I how do I make this feel the way I want where can I take advantage of things that are already happening and kind of tweak them in ways that are to my advantage how do I save myself from a lot of pain you know be proactive with this stuff you'll end up happier I promise a couple other quick things like these are upload settings which are not at all sexy or anything but you're going to want to limit the size by totals really think through this is part of considering like how big is this thing going to get what does that mean if people max out the storage they probably won't in most cases and you can override it for individual pieces but set a conservative site upload space here and make it part of both the training and kind of how you're thinking about encouraging people to do what like you know if you're saying like something really restrictive like 10 megabytes or something like that you could you could have part of your training it's like when you're uploading video put it on youtube and embed it here do not upload video you could remove upload uh you can remove the video file types from this upload category um you know you could set a max file size that was lower kind of take advantage of of kind of some of this built-in stuff but have it be parallel in your documentation so that people understand what their other options are and we got pretty aggressive with allowing different file types like we got into you know some of the 3d files some weird stuff so you can definitely expand this list in a lot of different ways and you might have to because educators tend to use some really non-standard file formats but just you know keep in mind that this is one gateway to those controls and you can override those controls on individual sites so that's a important thing to know and then the last one on this generic screen is an admin menus you can make it so that admins of individual sites don't even see plug-in as an option in the sidebar that to me is one end of the the polarity spectrum and the other end is activating it and making 600 plugins available so you know I think activating it is good um you want to have a healthy ecosystem of plugins otherwise you know kind of what's the point in in my mind um but you don't want it to be overwhelming to individual users you don't want so many plugins that your environment is always in chaos and you're kind of hopping around putting out brush fires all the time so that's that's something to think about I'm Tom I'm sure we'll get into plugins and some of the recommended kind of essential ones but like how do you communicate with your community what plugins are available like one of the struggles I had early on and as they started to grow in number like yeah it can be a long list and people like like was was there a resource for that like was there a way so people could kind of vet quickly here's the combo of plugins that create this site or like that was maybe not but that was always something kind of seemingly what the what other tools try and fill the need of yes and there's I know a couple of plugins for plugin management and WordPress multi-site some of which enable you to kind of group the plugins uh in particular ways we didn't end up doing that on rampages honestly because I just didn't end up having the time or energy to put into it to do it right what we found too was we did do some of the like here's a site it uses this theme these plugins to create this interaction so we had kind of a repository of things like that that you could see wasn't as good as I would like it to be but like we did have that in existence you know I think if you look at the data for rampages most people don't activate a whole lot of plugins that could be a failure of communication on on our part or a failure of education but we would go through a lot of times if we did like in class presentations we would hit like all right here are three or four plugins we think you'll use because of what you're doing and in faculty conversations you know as we got down to the nitty gritty like that's when we would do a little more advocacy for plugins or themes it's not as independent as I might like it to be but you know that that was probably the the root of it were I doing it now I think I would build a system such that you could look at a plugin and see all the public sites that are using it as well as a little description of what it does because that would be pretty easy to build in WordPress multi-site and it'd be super cool and I'd probably do that for themes so like you could do all sorts of neat combinations of that with the database that I think would be a lot of fun and it would be kind of like ability to like tour people through like yeah well you might want to use that and then here's how people use this cocktail of plugins and themes to create a podcasting site or a video site right like really start thinking broadly about templating and packaging it because I think WordPress obviously immensely powerful tool immensely popular but if you don't give people some very specific guidelines to how they can use these tools it will be underutilized often or they'll say okay I can't do it you know absolutely it's again that line like trying to figure out like what do you have the people in time to do what's going to make the biggest impact for you you know are you really pushing this hard because I mean one of the things people often say this does is creates digital fluency what do you mean by that what is that how are you going to see it here because I mean I mean if you got a WYSIWYG editor or Gutenberg then like you know are you creating digital fluency you know what what is that are you having people look at the HTML you know are they figuring out what plugins do and you know really leveraging the the database aspect of WordPress to create content and structure in ways that you couldn't with just a flat HTML page like those are the kind of questions you want to think through and you want to think through how plugins align to that and what sort of things they allow people to do that are kind of above and beyond and that's all part of you thinking through the culture and the focus of your site or your community as a whole you'll note that I have clicked on the add new site piece so I can do that as a super admin you'll note mine is creating things in the subdirectory the reason I choose subdirectory on this one is because it's easier on local dev so but that's one of your initial setup choices do I want to be subdirectory or subdomain and the difference for everybody is like you know my address is mutist.local so with subdirectory this will become mutist.local slash foo with subdomain it'd be foo.mutist.local and that stands for mutest but in any case that's a choice we want subdirectories in rampages for a variety of reasons nowadays like you'll see people arguing about seo stuff around subdirectories versus subdomains and a lot of different stuff the reason I encourage subdirectories in our case is we wanted to kind of have it be rampages first because you're part of that community rather than leading with the individual and then having the community kind of aspect come come afterwards so you could argue either point certainly if your multi-site is installed in a subdirectory you're going to have to use subdirectories another thing is subdomains can give you some hassles with SSL certificates and if you're doing any sort of CDN caching and some technical things like that sometimes subdirect subdomains can be a little bit a little bit harder but I'm sure the the gym can maybe talk talk more about that if problems occur the thing with we have run into that Meredith has become like our resident expert on getting wildcard SSL working with WordPress multi-site for subdomains and it's a separate certificate that isn't necessarily one you can get directly for free through let's encrypt but you're right it adds a layer of complexity subdomains to actually getting SSL I've always preferred subdomains because early on you could map a domain easily to a subdomain so you could have gym groom dot rampages dot us but then say gym groom dot com is an easy mapping but I don't think that's really matters anymore you can do that with subdirectories as well as subdomains so it really is a matter of preference and where you're kind of setting up now there is no there used to be an argument for it I thought but I don't even know if there is other than preference and maybe some complexity with SSL yeah in these days like mapping a custom domain to these is is you know if anyone deeply cares about it like that that to me is the option you know if you want to go outside of the whatever it is that we we decided on cool get your own domains not that much you can point it at it and as you saw what we were talking I created that site I do want to show you one thing real quick here when I click edit site this is the the WordPress multi site type of editing so I could change the URL I could even lie and say when it was created I've got some attributes I can apply to it I can even customize this list in the end if I want to although I think it takes programming but it's one way you might keep track of the sites like say that there was an option for course here or portfolio or whatever you want but that that possibility is there I can see the people associated with the site and add them centrally or remove them here is where I can to I can add themes at the multi site level invisible to anyone and this is where I would enable them for the individual sites should I choose to do it that way that can be nice in that you can have a lot more themes or a theme that has one license and is paid and you don't make it visible to people you just activate it for an individual site and that's that's a really nice option and then there are the just basic settings where you can come back here and change some stuff this is going to look like if you're familiar with the database this should look kind of familiar and look this is where you can override the default space quota so not terribly exciting but functional and really handy when you're managing sites and then if I wanted to add a user let me add one real quick I used to not understand why programmers used foo and bar in this case didn't work for me but it saves you from having to think of something complex when you're doing stuff so now I've got a user I can reset their password if I needed to you know I can send them the link for it you know it's just really nice I can control all that I could even change their settings if I needed to and then they just show up as a user there they are and I can delete them and control them all and you can see in this case they're not assigned to any sites but I can do that easily enough so Tom one of the questions we get a lot early on is with settings for WordPress multi site the upload file limit and where you would change that and where you would override so you have the files which comes up and you pointed to that but there's that max upload file size one heads up whether you host to reclaim or whatever you can change it here but you also might have to change it on the server in PHP setting so yes that is an issue wherever you're hosting your WordPress multi site keep that in mind because we get that question a lot that's a good one because you're like I changed it to 150 you know megabytes and I'm still only able to do 1500 kilobytes and so keep that in mind that's that's that's a an old gold question that I still have to think about twice as you were going through this to say oh yeah that's right you got to change that absolutely the php.ini file right in i can can can override all this stuff and they can be hidden in weird places and you know sometimes I feel like you need to put one every like every folder directory you know I mean it could be a little frustrating but and it's a good reminder because a lot of a WordPress multi site really is you know when you're running it and we're thinking about scale and a lot of the questions will get into over the course of the month right a question is like is this going to be running in a shared hosting site is it going to be running on its own server and also often that php.ini is an indicator of you know this this instance and what how you scale it is reflective of the resources at the edge of the server whether it's storage whether it's cpu and you know it will grow and expand probably quickly beyond shared hosting so that's a good reminder is that yeah this is linked to a server that has specific settings to limit the amount of uploads that are happening etc so um anyway that's a friendly reminder from your local hosts right yeah excellent point and and back to that kind of apartment building metaphor like we can give you a thermostat that cranks up to 120 but you know you're going to be bound to some degree by the heating system of the building and kind of if everybody's trying to run it to 120 we're going to blow things up pretty quick um so you you keep thinking through like well how do I make reasonable settings at the individual level when do I allow people to go outside them how do I accomplish goals without kind of destroying or taxing the whole system in ways that are unsustainable like that's that's what makes it harder but it's also a system you can control and see and people you can talk to and work things out so you know it's worth worth I think the cost of some of that um the one quick difference too I want to show about themes it's like there three themes installed here only one is network enabled so if I went to an individual site and this is literally how I do it um as an admin I only see one theme in here so if I go back to themes and I network enable notice how it's gone blue two and then go back to sites appearance now I've got two of them so that's a little bit different feels a little bit different um but again is handy because it lets you um kind of have more themes on hand as options but not necessarily show all of that complexity the same thing does not apply for plugins it doesn't I was thinking it did I'm glad you said that no let's let's add classic editor I don't know why I would choose that one or why five million other people would choose that one thank you for pointing that out in this case like check this out and this is something that has always bothered me um so if I go to the dashboard here it's there but you wouldn't think that it would be and network activate here means it's going to turn it on in a way that can't be turned off for all of the sites on your network so that's a very it's it's the it's like almost the same language network enable versus network activate but entirely different um actions on things that are right next to each other that you would think would behave in the same way so that's that's important to know exactly that's a little bit of a trap building the word it really is and I'll go into WordPress multi-sites and I'll be like why the hell are there like 30 network activated plugins like what is going on and that that was the cause yeah so yeah definitely be aware of that um you will notice too like as you think this through decide whether things are going to be auto updating or not your plugins your themes are you going to do that sort of stuff every month what's that testing going to look like there's a there's a lot of stuff involved here to think through but you know now I feel like we've kind of established a decent initial tour of of what this would look like as you sign up and how to start messing with things is there anything that y'all note that I missed anything we need to hit harder I wonder if one of the things to talk about is the various flavors of WordPress right like things that you would you would I would I don't know how we say couple with WordPress multi-site whether it be like buddy press or yeah yeah I think that's that's an important thing to know is that people have done a lot with the multi-site um kind of platform to build on top of it buddy press is one of the older better known ones that kind of makes it more like a social network um it does things like create community streams it does some user profile stuff that's pretty nice user groups I think it works with is it bb press to do some forum stuff it starts to feel a lot more socially then then default WordPress it does or at least it did back in the day take a bit more resources so it's something you want to do with intention it changes the default sign up process to some degree I remember back in the day when we turned it on Gardner Campbell was did not like the buddy press versus WordPress thing so we had to go to great lengths to kind of re uh take control of the of the sign up process and make it more like the initial word press there's commons in a box which is more of an academic bent from the CUNY people they now have two flavors classic and open lab and it has kind of some some more academia leaning some OER type of focus there's some stuff like that there's things like press books which is all about creating OER textbooks and it uses WordPress multi site as the foundation it's important to note that with any of these I think learn dash is another option when you activate these plugins they have to be turned on at the network level they impact every every site on the network and that can be good it can also you know be bad like press books you pretty much are just going to run a press books install don't try and do anything out learn dash I kind of feel the same way uh buddy press and commons in a box are a little less intrusive in my opinion they more augment WordPress rather than kind of take it over and make it do something almost entirely different um than than what it started out doing but it's one of those things you kind of think through like again what's my site what do I want it to do are there things that helped me do that what are those things and it doesn't make sense to do that for every site on this network any other pieces I'm missing here that seem like it took care of the flavors you're muted dim muted and jitzy those are some of the the the flavors I can think of with WordPress multi site that come in learn dash I've actually I have supported it with people who had it installed but I've never seen it in the multi site or seen what it does but I know it's it does kind of change the whole look and feel the site I mean I wonder a lot of schools won't have this problem but like will commerce would be another one right like tools like gravity forms like there are some powerful plugins right now we're getting it's a distinction between like there are like apps within apps like commons in a box press books and learn dash and then there are some that are right on the border right that are started as plugins and then became full blown like apps of their own and we'll probably cover some more of that but like that's uh that that is that's a good overview of a lot of those well in the line I would draw there is like gravity forms is going to provide you a limited tool set to create very particular types of interactions these what I'll call flavors kind of impact the possibilities across the spectrum of the site so that's kind of how I'd talk about the difference um gravity forms adds a tool to the tool belt these flavoring things kind of change the entire tool belt to some degree they're altering and expanding things with kind of a very um opinionated view about what the WordPress site should do in the long run and how people are going to be using it um so that's that's kind of the difference that that that I see between them like Gutenberg I'm sorry anyway I'm sorry I I have no flag to bear here I promise I did no but I think in the next session we will look towards stuff like vision aligning some of the goals you have for these and looking more broadly about here's the overview how are you going to do this and make this work for your community what are you coming to with it and as a result what would you need to make it work specifically in that context does that make sense Amanda and Tom yeah absolutely because we're getting again from vanilla install and just roughly understanding what our landscape is to how do we start to customize this but we have to know where we're going otherwise like what's the point and you know higher ed institutions with with projects like these have different degrees of requirements and what we want to make sure is like we're doing everything we can to make this easy for you so that you can prove success so that you can have happy people and you can spend your time doing stuff that's actually like fun and interesting instead of like SSL certificate wildcards like that would suck who wants to do that so like you know I think that's the deal is you try and lessen all the hassle and focus on proving that you're awesome so you get money no matter who's in charge of what yeah absolutely all right well thank you Tom it's great and we will wrap it up here and excited for the rest of the sessions see you thank you